"If thus certain of his death, why, you may ask, did I not immediately make known the truth concerning the murder?
"Fear for myself, love for you, were the motives prompting me to concealment.
"I was an accessory after the fact, a perjurer likewise, and therefore amenable to the law. You were a babe of eighteen months, pretty and charming, the light of my life. To proclaim the truth meant imprisonment for me, separation from you; and withal, disgrace upon our common name. I could not bear the thought of this, and, therefore, deaf to the voice of justice, I continued to keep the truth hidden.
"But now, assured by the physician that I have not many days to live, I dare not die without making you the confidante of my guilty secret.
"This letter, signed with my name, together with your father's correspondence, which is contained in my private desk, will afford sufficient evidence of the innocence of Eric Marville.
"To you, then, my daughter, I leave the duty of clearing the memory of an injured man, hoping that you will be brave enough to face the consequent ignominy which must forever rest upon our name.
"Thérèse Rochefort."
Lorelie laid down the letter with a sigh.
"But I was not brave enough," she murmured.
Her father, Noel Rochefort, was credited with having destroyed a brilliant future by his chivalrous enterprise of rescuing from prison a friend whom he deemed to be innocent: and, as the daughter of such, Lorelie, wherever she went, found herself an object of interest and sympathy, almost a heroine. Must she now proclaim that her father, the supposed hero, was in reality a murderer, and one, too, so base that in order to save his own neck he would have seen an innocent man, and his friend, go to the guillotine?